Interviews

In this interview taken during QCon 2007, Brian Zimmer talks about the architectural challenges he has faced working on Orbitz.com, one of America's most popular online travel booking sites. He touches the subject of dynamic languages and their importance in augmenting Java in order to become a better and richer platform.

In an interview at OOPSLA, Dave Thomas talks about the reasons for the rise of Java, what's behind Web 2.0, MDA and SOA, the rise of dynamic languages and the opportunities that he sees in the web as a platform.

Ola Bini discusses JRuby, an implementation of Ruby written in Java that runs on the JVM. Amongst other things, Ola talks about his appreciation for the Ruby community, and describes his view of the differences with the Java community. He also briefly discusses his vision on the future of Ruby, particularly the potential of merging some of the more powerful features found in Lisp.

JRuby project lead Charles Nutter discusses how he got involved with JRuby, Sun's involvement with JRuby, how JRuby fits into enterprise-level web applications, the possibility of a friendly fork of the OpenJDK source code, reasons for switching to JRuby, the future of JRuby, Spring and JRuby, and the Ruby community as a whole.

Groovy project manager Guillaume Laforge discusses the history of Groovy, it's relationship to Java, where Groovy fits into Java development,how Groovy compares to Ruby, how Groovy enables domain-specific languages, and what future Groovy development will focus on.

InfoQ Ruby editor Obie Fernandez interviews Tim Bray, one of the inventors of XML and current Director of Web Technologies for Sun Microsystems. We cover varied topics such as his opinions about Ruby and Rails, the impact of dynamic languages on web development, static versus dynamic typing, Sun's support of the JRuby project, Atom, and WS-* versus REST approaches to systems integration.